Letters to the Editor
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necks
according to my latest edit of Wikipedia's polar bear entry, all of their populations are increasing and doing fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear
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FUNNY, I THOUGHT ERNEST THESIGER WAS DEAD!!!!!
Freeman Dyson, the "eminent physicist?" I thought he was GYRO GEARLOOSE(tm) or Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Pretorius in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN raising his wineglass with the toast "TO A NEW WORLD OF GODS AND MONSTERS!" And HERE I thought the MADDEST of the MAD SCIENTISTS was George Zucco, Lionel Atwill, Colin Clive, Peter Cushing, George Coulouris, Claude Rains, Frederic March, Vincent Price, John Carradine, Christopher Lee, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.....NO, THEY were ALL FICTIONAL CHARACTERS portrayed by those actors. Freeman Dyson, UNFORTUNATELY, is an actual LIVING human, sorry, IN-HUMAN BEAST whose Dr. Pretorius type of scientific AMORALITY, i.e., "Let's celebrate genetic engineering and our ability to design a new world of plants and creatures" SOUNDS UNCOMFORTABLY LIKE "TO A NEW WORLD OF GODS AND MONSTERS," NOW DOESN'T IT? Besides which, Freeman Dyson LOOKS A HELL OF A LOT like Ernest Thesiger, albeit with SHORTER HAIR!!!!! This is where we came in, I believe.....
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Such nonsense...
A long time ago there was a mini battle of the bands. The rock group Yes came out with an album called "Fragile" with a depiction of the planet on the cover. Then the Mennonite outcasts Bachmann Turner Overdrive came out with "Not Fragile" featuring a wooden case containing steel engine parts on the cover. I hated BTO -- so much.
What BTO and Dyson seem to not understand is that nature is a vastly, vastly more complex system than science will probably ever understand. Before we began seriously destroying it, the global ecosystem was a stupendously varied and complex riot of life. And this huge diversity was indeed extremely fragile -- at least in the sense of reactive fragility. It is true that fragile nature does not mean glass or shatter fragile, still, a reactive fragility can and will eventually collapse if continually abused. Nature bend and reformed to accomodate us as aboriginals. But when we began our long march down civilization's road, we have asked nature to bend more and more. At some point she will tip....
As E.O. Wilson said, the product of evolution is diversity. And the more diversity there is, the better everyone's chance of survival, if just for the fact that there's potentially more on the menu on any given day. But with this diversity comes indeed delicate webbings cast in all directions -- some even in dimensions we cannot see, and never will with science and rationalism.
When I see ANYTHING man-made I just have to laugh: so crude, so simple, so overdone, so horribly out of tune with any real support system, i.e., such a pathetic one-off stab in the dark. No understanding of interconnectedness, nor entropy. But yet Dyson and all the other techno-fetishers think shiny gew-gaw with its straight lines and perfect curves is somehow superior to what nature does. And far worse, they believe they can jump in the game of life at any point or moment and reap some mega-bonanza just for humans with a crude, brute-force understanding of genetics that borders on Kindergarten-ish.
There once were shamans who obsessed 24/7 about how to fit in with nature. They saw everything happening around them as signs of either approval or disapproval from the natural god-forces. They were the true masters of nature. Not these clowns with their laughable understandings of how nature can be over-amped and hot-wired.
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Over the hill, and lost in the woods
I don't see anyone else here mentioning William Shockley, (co)-inventor of the transistor, winner of the Nobel prize, who evidently decided on that basis that he was an Expert on All Things, and took to pontificating on eugenics. I leave it to others to tease out why the Dyson interview made me think of Shockley. For my own part, let me just say I found the utter lack of rational legitimacy behind Mr. Dyson's pollyanna-isms both egregious and discouraging.
A few others have mentioned the extreme complexity of biological systems, and I'd like to second that notion. Consider that if a command monetary economy (such as was attempted by the Soviet Union and Maoist China) was unable to succeed, then what rational person can imagine that the "command biological economy" that Mr. Dyson seems to advocate could possibly fair any better?
(For reference to the idea of "command" vs. "market" systems, I include the following link, as well as its foreshortened version via TINYURL:)
http://econc10.bu.edu/economic_systems/Lecture_notes/Introduction/intro_types_of_ecsys.htm
http://tinyurl.com/2dmqbn
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dash dash multi-Tilde person think about this
Anyone who even has a nuanced response to Global Warming is cast out of heaven. Well that was to be expected.
If the government had listened to Dyson back when he was saying that accelerator physics was a waste of money and shouldn't be funded, then particle physics would not be an experimental science.
We wouldn't have been able to find the weak bosons. The Standard Model of particle physics would be purely speculative, not shored up by countless reams of experimental data.
And he said this AFTER deep inelastic scattering had already begin to reveal the quark structure hiding inside the proton.
How can anyone argue against funding accelerator physics AFTER deep inelastic scattering?
The man's arrogant presumptiveness in the past almost brought down his own field. He very nearly brought modern physics to a screeching halt in America because of his own need to get attention by adopting radical contrarian views.
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He should put this on his resume
"Nearly brought modern particle physics to a screeching halt by arguing against the funding of large accelerator experiments two years after deep inelastic scattering observed at a large accelerator experiment revealed a complex particle structure hidden inside the proton."
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Sunset on Scientists...Particularly sacred ones who need to believe.
Alas, there comes a time in every man's life, when the cells leaving town are greater in number than the cells regenerating. Have a nice lunch, sit and read and old book, have a nap. Time is over.
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Classic Dyson
Optimistic, heterodox, bold to a fault, and unafraid of big ideas and the inevitable weirdness of the future.
Above all, though, even more than he is a futurist — maybe even the futurist — Dyson is a scientist. He treats his ideas not as doctrine or prediction but as hypothesis, and here is where Roychoudhuri missed the boat.
When Dyson says that it's better to be wrong than to be vague, that's because we don't learn anything from vague hypotheses. In science falsification is where it's at, and specific, explicit ideas that turn out to be wrong are the engine of illumination. Unfortunately Roychoudhuri's line of questioning never really picked up that thread.
Let's pick global warming. Dyson's opinion about the severity of world climate change is frankly less interesting per se than the process by which he arrived at it. That's what's always made Dyson interesting to hear from, right or wrong. And Roychoudhuri walked right up to the question I really wanted to see answered — "If you're wrong, how and when will you know, and what do we do about it then?" — but never opened the door.
That's not the sort of question you can ask your average climate-change-denier or gen-mod PR shill — they aren't people who really know why they believe something nor are they prepared to look at the possibility that they could be wrong.
But Dyson is not among them, and I couldn't help but feel a sense of loss at the opportunity to hear more from him.